Image: Google

I wrote this story for Grist, where it first appeared.

Google is officially in the green energy business. The search giant announced on Tuesday that its Google Energy subsidiary signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with NextEra Energy. Google will begin buying 114 megawatts of electricity from an Iowa wind farm on July 30.

Google, of course, cannot directly use the clean green energy generated by the wind farm; that power goes into the local grid. So Google Energy will sell the power on the regional spot market, where utilities and electricity retailers go to buy power when demand spikes and they have a shortfall. Google will use the revenue from spot market sales to buy renewable energy certificates (RECs) which will offset its greenhouse gas emissions.

Many companies buy RECs in an attempt to be carbon neutral, obtaining them from third-party brokers. But by purchasing RECs directly tied to the renewable energy it is also buying, Google is getting a bigger bang for its buck.

“By contracting to purchase so much energy for so long, we’re giving the developer of the wind farm financial certainty to build additional clean energy projects,” Urs Hoelzle, Google’s senior vice president for operations, wrote on a blog post Tuesday.

“The inability of renewable energy developers to obtain financing has been a significant inhibitor to the expansion of renewable energy,” he added. “We’ve been excited about this deal because taking 114 megawatts of wind power off the market for so long means producers have the incentive and means to build more renewable energy capacity for other customers.”

In a statement on its site, Google also noted that its motivations for signing long-term renewable energy contracts are not entirely altruistic.

“Through the long term purchase of renewable energy at a predetermined price, we’re partially protecting ourselves against future increases in power prices,” the company stated. “This is a case where buying green makes business sense.”

It remains to be seen how big a green power purchaser Google will become. (The company has also invested directly in a wind project built by NextEra Energy, the biggest American wind power producer.)

But Dan Reicher, Google.org director of climate change and energy programs, told me earlier this year that finding clean ways of powering Google’s massive data centers led in part to the establishment of Google Energy.

“This interest in procuring green electrons is part of what’s driven Google Energy,” he said.

Worldwide revenues from the solar photovoltaic, wind and biofuels industries jumped 53% in 2008 to $116 billion and is on track to grow to $325 billion by 2018, according to a report released Tuesday by West Coast market research firm Clean Edge.

Last year’s boom, however, is unlikely to be repeated in 2009, given the global financial crisis. Signs of the slowdown were apparent last year as new global investment in green energy grew by a paltry 4.7% to $155 billion, compared to a 60% rise between 2006 and 2007. In the United States, however, venture capital investments in green tech grew 22% last year to $3.3 billion, representing 12% of all VC investments, according to figures compiled by research firm New Energy Finance.

“2009 is a year to get through,” said report author Ron Pernick during a conference call.

Of course, growth projections for renewable energy are inherently speculative. Green energy investment is strongly dependent on government policy and what the Obama administration gives today in the form of billions in subsidies and incentives a successor can take away. And then there are calamities like the extent of the meltdown of the global economy that few foresaw even a year ago.

The wind industry accounted for a third of renewable energy revenues in 2008, becoming a $50 billion business. Clean Edge projects that employment in the wind and solar industries will grow from a combined 600,000 jobs in 2008 to 2.7 million by 2018.

“As the market transitions to low-carbon fuel and electricity sources, conservation and efficiency efforts, and the deployment of a smart, 21st century grid, we believe clean energy offers one of the greatest opportunities for both local and global economies to compete and thrive,” wrote Pernick and co-authors Joel Makower and Clint Wilder.

They identified as growth areas smart grid technologies, energy storage for wind and solar farms, the Eastern Eureopean market, power grid infrastructure and micro power grids that provide electricity to self-contained facilities or areas.

photo: Todd Woody

When Green Wombat offered up as a “talking point” the observation that the wind industry now employs more people than coal mining, the post set off some vociferous chatter in the blogosphere, fueled in part by my inadvertent error of referring to the “coal industry” in a subsequent reference rather than “coal mining.”

Eoin O’Carroll at the The Christian Science Monitor‘s Bright Green Blog called the comparison between 85,000 wind industry jobs and 81,000 coal mining jobs “bogus,” citing sources pegging direct industry-wide employment in coal at 136,000 to 174,000. Other commentators pointed out that wind power currently provides only about 1-2% of the United States’ electricity while coal supplies around 49%, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Fair enough. But let’s add some context. As Salon‘s Andrew Leonard pointed out, “The key takeaway shouldn’t be employment, but growth rates.” Employment in the wind industry grew 70% between 2007 and 2008 as a result of a 50% jump in the amount of installed wind capacity in the United States last year. And this number bears repeating: 42% of all new U.S. electricity generation in 2008 came from wind farms, the equivalent of building 14 600-megawatt coal-fired power plants – without the environmental devastation that comes from strip-mining and releasing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That extraordinary growth in wind power was, until the recession hit, reviving abandoned factories in the industrial Midwest as European turbine makers and their suppliers set up shop close to what has become the world’s largest wind market.

While wind produces a tiny percentage of the country’s total electricity today, the U.S. does not have a national power grid and energy generation varies widely by state. (For instance, in-state coal-fired power plants supplied 86% of Ohio’s electricity in 2006, according to the Energy Department, but only 1.1% of California’s – though the Golden State obtains about 20% of its electricity from out-of-state coal plants, a practice being phased out by its global warming law).

In Texas, wind accounts for 4.9% of the state’s electricity generation, according to the state grid operator. Last week, Texas regulators announced they would invest $5 billion to expand transmission lines to bring wind power from remote west Texas wind farms to big cities like Dallas and Houston. That $5 billion, no doubt, will also generate quite a few green jobs and trigger even more wind development once the credit crunch eases.

Jon Wellinghoff, the new acting chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, has identified the Great Plains – dubbed the Saudi Arabia of wind – as the prime candidate for a massive power grid project to connect the region’s wind farms to metropolitan regions currently dependent on coal-fired power. Again, such an initiative would generate thousands of jobs. (A 2008 Department of Energy report found that if such transmission hurdles were overcome the nation could obtain as much as 20% of its electricity from wind farms.)

Obviously, coal is not going away any time soon. (And those wind turbines are made of steel, after all.) But with the Obama administration willing to spend billions on a smart power grid to expand green energy production and half the states mandating renewable energy targets – not to mention a looming national cap-and-trade system that would assign a price to the environmental cost of coal-fired electricity – it seems clear which industry will be generating the jobs of the future.

photo: Todd Woody

Here’s a talking point in the green jobs debate: The wind industry now employs more people than coal mining in the United States.

Wind industry jobs jumped to 85,000 in 2008, a 70% increase from the previous year, according to a report released Tuesday from the American Wind Energy Association. In contrast, the coal industry mining employs about 81,000 workers. (Those figures are from a 2007 U.S. Department of Energy report but coal employment has remained steady in recent years though it’s down by nearly 50% since 1986.) Wind industry employment includes 13,000 manufacturing jobs concentrated in regions of the country hard hit by the deindustrialization of the past two decades.

The big spike in wind jobs was a result of a record-setting 50% increase in installed wind capacity, with 8,358 megawatts coming online in 2008 (enough to power some 2 million homes). That’s a third of the nation’s total 25,170 megawatts of wind power generation. Wind farms generating more than 4,000 megawatts of electricity were completed in the last three months of 2008 alone.

Another sign that wind power is no longer a niche green energy play: Wind accounted for 42% of all new electricity generation installed last year in the U.S. Power, literally, is shifting from the east to west, to the wind belt of the Midwest, west Texas and the West Coast. Texas continues to lead the country, with 7,116 megawatts of wind capacity but Iowa in 2008 overtook California for the No. 2 spot, with 2,790 megawatts of wind generation. Other new wind powers include Oregon, Minnesota, Colorado and Washington state.

But last year’s record is unlikely to be repeated in 2009 as the global credit crisis delays or scuttles new projects because developers are unable to secure financing for wind farms. Layoffs have already hit turbine makers like Clipper Windpower and Gamesa as well as companies that produce turbine towers, blades and other components.

The Obama administration’s $825 billion stimulus package includes a three-year extension of a key production tax credit that has spurred the wind industry’s expansion. But given the dearth of investors with tax liabilities willing to invest in wind projects in exchange for the credits, the stimulus is unlikely to be stimulating to the industry unless the tax credit is made refundable to developers.

The U.S. wind industry is dominated by European wind developers and turbine makers – General Electric (GE) and Clipper are the only two domestic turbine manufacturers – and those companies’ fortunes rise and fall with the global economy. As the U.S. market has boomed, European companies have been moving production close to their customers – the percentage of domestically manufactured wind turbine components rose from 30% to 50% between 2005 and 2008, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

photo: CEMEX

The cement industry’s contribution to global warming is pretty concrete – it’s responsible for 5% of greenhouse gas emissions, fueled by demand from the rapidly industrializing economies of China and India.

Now CEMEX, the Mexican building materials giant, has taken steps to green up its operation. Not by changing the way it makes cement but how it powers the process. Late last week, Mexican President Felipe Calderón inaugurated the first phase of what will be a $550 million, 250-megawatt Oaxaca wind farm – Latin America’s largest – that will generate the equivalent of a quarter of the electricity CEMEX consumes in Mexico.

The EURUS wind farm is a joint development between CEMEX (CX) and Acciona, the Spanish renewable energy powerhouse. The first 25 turbines will go online by March and the final phase will be completed by the end of 2009. A CEMEX spokesman said Acciona will retain ownership of the wind farm and sell the electricity to CEMEX under a 20-year contract. The electricity from EURUS will go into the power grid and CEMEX will receive “electricity credits” for the power produced.

Mexico has become the next frontier for the wind industry. The same day Calderón presided over the opening of EURUS he also dedicated a nearby 80-megawatt wind farm built by Spanish company Iberdrola Renewables.

T. Boone Pickens and Texas may be the kings of Big Wind but California is catching up, buying gigawatts of green electricity from turbines planted on the windswept flatlands of … Oregon.

On Monday, Southern California Edison became the latest Golden State utility to look north, announcing a 20-year contract to buy a whopping 909 megawatts from Caithness Energy’s Shepherd’s Flat project. The 303-turbine wind farm will span two Oregon counties and 30 square miles when it goes online between 2011 and 2012. PG&E (PCG), meanwhile, signed a deal in July for 240 megawatts of wind power from Horizon Wind Energy’s turbine ranch in the same area. That’s on top of 85 megawatts it agreed to buy last year from PPM Energy (now called Iberdrola Renewables) in a neighboring county that’s part of a turbine tier of counties on Oregon’s northern border. Earlier this month the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power approved a 72-megawatt contract with Willow Creek Energy for wind power from the same area in Oregon.

So why ship electricity a thousand miles down the West Coast when California already plans to add gigawatts of in-state wind energy? In a word, transmission.

“The beauty of this particular project is that it is already fully permitted and has transmission already available,” Stuart Hemphill, Southern California Edison’s (EIX) vice president for renewable and alternative power, told Green Wombat.

“Oregon has a terrific wind resource,” he adds. “It far exceeds that in California.”

In December 2006 the utility signed an agreement to purchase 1,500 megawatts from a giant wind farm to be built by a subsidiary of Australia’s Allco Financial Group in Southern California’s Tehachapi region. But the project is dependent on the construction of new transmission lines – often an environmentally contentious and drawn-out process in California.

“It is expected to go online in 2010,” says Hemphill of the wind farm. “We’re just getting the transmission project up and running. The first three segments have been approved and we’re doing the building now.”

With California’s investor-owned utilities facing a 2010 deadline to obtain 20% of their electricity from renewable sources, expect the Oregon green rush to continue.

About Green Wombat

Green Wombat is written by
Todd Woody, a veteran environmental journalist based in California who writes for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Grist and Yale e360. He's one of the few people on the planet who have held a northern hairy-nosed wombat in the wild.

Todd formerly was a senior editor at Fortune magazine, an assistant managing editor at Business 2.0 magazine and the business editor of the San Jose Mercury News.